Market Dominance Guys
Buying Cycle
Episodes
Wednesday Jan 27, 2021
EP66: Strategize, Execute, Evaluate, Repeat
Wednesday Jan 27, 2021
Wednesday Jan 27, 2021
On today’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex, by addressing how sales got a dirty name. Chris explains that in ancient times, the salesman met the buyer face to face, but the encounter was usually a one-time transaction. Then, the camel caravan moved on, and if the buyer wasn’t happy with his purchase, there was no one to appeal to for a replacement and no one to lodge a customer complaint with. Ancient sales was a hit-and-run relationship that frequently left a bad taste in the buyer’s mouth about salesmen. But in modern times, the sale is never over, because the telephone and the internet have created an ongoing relationship between sellers and buyers. The modern salesperson needs to understand that you can run, but you can’t hide, which makes it imperative that reps provide value to their customers.
Jason and the Market Dominance Guys segue into a discussion of what type of personalities are best suited to be salespeople and what types should definitely NOT hold this job. The attributes of being pro-active and persistent are touted, as well as the importance of being in sales for the right reasons. As Jason puts it, “If closing the deal at the end of the day isn’t what you live for, then don’t be in sales.”
This team of sales-savvy guys wraps things up with a discussion of the cycle of the sales process for a new product and why it works — as this podcast’s title says — to Strategize, Execute, Evaluate, and Repeat.
Wednesday Dec 09, 2020
EP60: Diagnosing Discovery Call Failures
Wednesday Dec 09, 2020
Wednesday Dec 09, 2020
In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, we’ll dissect that sales process called the “discovery call” and diagnose the problem that is keeping sales reps from making a successful one. Chris, Corey, and Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, share their opinions on the subject, and lament the unfortunate fact that most sales reps have no set method for conducting a discovery call that includes true discovery.
As Oren describes it, “Selling is a bit icky, and [salespeople] want to retreat quickly back to the relative calm of their normal lives. Once a salesperson hears one thing [from the prospect] that’s an indicator of interest, they want to hit the buzzer” and immediately jump to the sales pitch so they can end their own discomfort. As Oren sees it, this cut-to-the-chase method is the primary reason many discovery calls fail. Instead of truly finding out what problems the prospect or his company might have, which the product being offered might solve, reps skip right over the creation of a relationship that might help them eventually make that sale. Chris is convinced that salespeople can actually be coached on where they went wrong during a discovery call and how to do it in a way that works. In this podcast, you can listen to the two questions that Chris begins his own discovery calls with — and then find out what the heck “the dog, the meat, and the chain-link fence” have to do with this subject. Who knew that a discussion about discovery calls could be so insightful and entertaining?
If you missed the first half of this conversation, you can get it here:
https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/getting-prospects-from-fear-to-commitment/
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
EP25: Three Reasons Sales Reps Don‘t Follow Up
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
Tuesday Apr 07, 2020
In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall talks with ConnectAndSell's Customer Success Manager, Donny Crawford drilling it down to the three reasons Sales Teams don't follow up. When we hire people to sell for us, whether it's to sell meetings or whether it's to sell deals, we tend to put them under a compensation regime that emphasizes this quarter. Need happens at this moment to match up with what you can provide. And in order to determine their need, you have to have a discovery conversation with them. And until you have a discovery conversation, you don't actually know whether they need your offering at all much.
As we know that mounts the pressure to meet numbers of calls but doesn't usually accomplish closing more deals. Learn how yes, no, not now affects our emotion tied to rejection and perception of rejection - the ability to keep our emotions in check. This is part one of a two-part session.
Monday Dec 30, 2019
EP15: All Dead Companies are Equally Uninteresting.
Monday Dec 30, 2019
Monday Dec 30, 2019
The classic book, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, is a manifesto, a field manual, and sales’ version of Dr. Spock’s book on “company rearing” for new entrepreneurs…all in one. To level set for a brief moment – and Googling an image of Dr. Moore’s chasm graph may be helpful for the episode here - marketers have traditionally identified different kinds of B2B tech buyers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and finally the Laggards.
The traditional model assumed that, in the lifespan of a product, the market is first dominated by the innovators, then the early adopters etc. down the line. This model implies a level of inevitability in the flow-through of one of these categories from another to another…as your business continues. Good in theory but not so easy in practice.
The reality of entering and competing for markets today, gaps exist between the categories in this model that are large enough to derail the most promising startups as they transition from one category of customers to the next.
And the biggest gap Moore writes about is the one between Early Adopters and Early Majority. This is where both bags of money and companies go to die. Because the GoTo market & sales strategies that win deals in the Early Adopters group, won’t necessarily work so well for the Early Majority group. Instead, you may find yourself at the bottom of a valley looking up at an el Capitan-like sheer vertical wall of market climbing ahead of you. The sales team by your side that did well in the early stage of capturing innovators and early adopters now find themselves often overmatched and underequipped by the challenge and technical nuances of a market wall this big.
Since it is vastly different market types, moving from early adopters to early majority requires new tools, new approaches, and a lot of new thinking.
So what is the new thinking? In this episode, I ask Chris about the simple differences in the type of team and skills and techniques you need to climb this wall and continue moving down Moore’s market path. Building trust is the core requirement – and without understanding how and why you need to manufacture it to scale this wall, you’ll be left floundering and eking for survival with other amateur but well-intentioned climbers at the lower reaches of this meager market wall. So once again welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “All dead companies are equally uninteresting.”
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
EP13: Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
Rocky. The Karate Kid. The Average Joes. Rudy. Underdogs. We love them. They are the people who use their grit combined with their well-coached and newly acquired skills to make waves, cause the odds-makers fits, and run up the score.
When you get funded by a VC and finally have the green light to release the Kraken and launch your vaunted sales machine, there is a temptation to run up the bill on the countless tools available in the sales and marketing stack and forget the meager stack from whence you came.
“Stand back…I have capital and I’m not afraid to use it!”...you’ll think.
Magic beans to make my phone ring?...I’ll take it!
A love potion to make my prospects swoon into a demo?...Yes, please!
A virtual dancing Elvis to get folks to download my white paper?...sure, why not?
You can spend the GDP of a small Caribbean country playing this game and feeling like you also have the perfect Millennial-friendly office, the best cold brew, and the ideal dress code and PTO policy.
But the most sophisticated and successful stack and culture in the world can be had right now if you simply have a tight message that works combined with a mechanism to talk to hundreds of thousands of people a year…AND doing it with a small team of sincere and empathetic salespeople.
But is it realistic?
In this episode I ask Chris if something like this only exists in the lab…or can it be really be seen in the wild.
Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode: “Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.”
Friday Nov 15, 2019
EP11: The Two-State Solution in Market Dominance: Dollars or Donuts?
Friday Nov 15, 2019
Friday Nov 15, 2019
States, lots of ‘em, 50 states. Plus Red States, Blue States. States of consciousness. Physical states. Liquid/Gas…
How about the state of Markets, being Market Dominant, or simply being an “also-ran?”
The fact is there are only two states you can reside in as a company: you're either dominating one market or more, or you're dominating zero. And if you're dominating zero markets, you WILL go out of business in time unless you turn into a company that IS dominating at least one market.
Market Dominance is security, it’s collateral, safety, shelter, asylum, parlay; but most importantly, it’s freedom. Because the only two reasons a company dominating a market can ever go out of business is either financial mismanagement or if the market is just too small.
So how do you map your journey to market dominance? What’s changed over the past few years that makes it easier for some and more difficult for others to even get out of the gates? In this chat, I ask Chris for his insights into the real stakes of entering this Octagon of business without true dominating intent. This is the Market Dominance Guys and today’s episode entitled, “The Two-State Solution in Market Dominance: Dollars or Donuts?”